The Polish film-maker Jerzy Skolimowski, friend and collaborator of Roman Polanski (he co-scripted Knife in the Water), was one of the major international talents of the European cinema of the 1960s and 70s. But apart from pursuing his other career of painting, he's done little of interest since the excellent Moonlighting in 1982. So Essential Killing is something of a comeback, if a relatively minor one. It's a stark, pared down, existential pursuit story, the protagonist being a Muslim terrorist named in the final credits as Mohammed (Vincent Gallo), who after killing three American soldiers is captured by American special forces in a narrow ravine in the scorching desert of what is probably Afghanistan. He's waterboarded and flown with a sack over his head to a snow-covered Poland, where he escapes from his captors during a blizzard in the forest and goes on the run, experiencing terrible hardships, killing several more men, and living by sucking the milk of a peasant woman.

There's virtually no dialogue: the hero has lost his hearing due to an exploding rocket; the farmer's wife who binds his wounds is a deaf mute. A number of symbols float around. One is the American helicopter constantly circling overhead. The most notable one is a white stallion covered in the hero's blood, which appears at Christmas time ("Silent Night" is played in the background). This is presumably intended to invoke the white horse that will be ridden by the Mahdi, the Islamic messiah. At the end there's the lingering suspicion that what we are watching are the memories of a dying man.